A reader asks, “How much should I invest to achieve Rs. 1 Crore in five years?”. Assuming you are sure that Rs. 1 Crores is the right amount of money, factoring in inflation for your goal, the answer depends on how important the goal is. If the goal deadline is non-negotiable, you “must”have the money…

We discuss how to plan for financial goals 5-10 years away. These goals are neither long-term enough to include equity nor short-term enough to avoid equity completely. Financial goal planning is all about setting the right priorities. If my need is within five years, it would be prudent to avoid all equity. Equity returns are…

A reader asked an interesting question: “Kindly guide on a rebalance doubt. When you redeem from a mutual fund, the units brought first are sold back to the AMC, but those units give us more profits. Once we redeem such units yearly, we reduce the possibility of better profits, right?” Investors will go to any…

Let us be honest about something. You can build the most careful spreadsheet, run every projection, and still fall short in your retirement corpus. Life gets in the way. Sometimes through choices you made. Sometimes through things you never saw coming. A medical emergency. A job that ended before you were ready. Sibling’s education. A…

With each passing day, Indians consume more than previous generations. Their aspirations, dreams, and wants are often higher than their salaries. Whenever I am invited to speak to a group of employees on the basics of investing, I hear stories of excessive debt. There is a growing mismatch between income and aspirations. People buy cars,…

NaviPlan is a privacy-first, local-only portfolio tracker and goal planner developed by Naviran Technologies in association with freefincal. We have covered its multi-asset tracking and goal-based investing features before. The tool has now released version 1.6.0 “Seamount”, and the headline addition is a significant one: a dedicated Tax Center. This is a major update for…

When we buy a property, it is natural to assume that the registered sale deed establishes that the seller is the owner and that we have now become the owner. But that is not quite how the Indian system works. India largely follows what is described as a presumptive title system through registration. More simply,…

A few years ago, I stopped seriously looking at buying a bigger house. Not because I couldn’t afford one. Not because I had carefully analysed my own situation and concluded that staying in the current apartment was the better choice.  The truth is far less sophisticated. I stopped because almost every smart person on the…

In my previous article, I asked a very basic question: what exactly is money? This time, I want to ask another apparently simple question: what exactly is saving, and why do we do it? To understand saving, we may have to go much further back than banks, salaries and bank balances. Long before human beings…

Another hidden risk in buying property is something many buyers may never consider. You may carefully examine the title deed, obtain an Encumbrance Certificate (EC), check the revenue records and verify the previous sale deeds, and still miss an arrangement that has created rights in the property outside the usual chain of registered property transactions….

A very common assumption among property buyers is that obtaining an Encumbrance Certificate, or EC, is enough to establish that a property is free from encumbrances. But an EC does not certify that the property has a perfectly clear title. It is essentially the result of a search of the transactions and instruments recorded in…

I feel almost a little silly asking such a basic question on a forum like this. It sounds too simple, perhaps even embarrassingly obvious. Yet I have often felt that, despite being educated and earning well, many of us have surprisingly little understanding of what money actually is. Money is often treated either as a…

A reader who sent us the following details wants to know if investing Rs. 75K a month (increasing 10% a year) will fetch him Rs. 10 Crores after 15-20 years with a 12% return expectation. He also wants to know how to allocate this money. Age:32 Profession: Consultant Emergency fund – building Term insurance –…

In June, we launched NaviPlan: a privacy-focused multi-asset tracker and Goal Planner. Developed by Gokul of Naviran Technologies in association with freefincal, this tool lets users track mutual funds, stocks, FDs, global assets, NPS, pension funds, and insurance policies! The user can tag these to financial goals and track their progress. The tool also offers…

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself asking AI more and more financial questions. Sometimes I already knew the answer. Other times I simply wanted to see how it reasoned. Can it calculate a retirement corpus? Compare the old and new tax regimes? Explain sequence of returns risk? Build an asset allocation? Review an…